Ghost Flight: Chapter Ten

On the day of her first solo meetup with Wendy, Melina wakes before dawn. Petros lies sleeping with his back to her, his breaths washing up and away from the shores of her ears in waves. Their steadiness doesn’t soothe her as it would have years earlier, when she was a girl picking her way over the rocks at Cessac Beach. Rather, it drives her from bed with the madness of someone repeating a word so many times that it ceases to make sense, or stroking a patch of her skin raw with the gentlest arcs of their thumb. Breath held, Melina creeps from the room.